The present invention relates to a conveyor system for conveying work pieces to and from a work station. It has particular application to a conveyor system of a kind used to convey relatively fragile work pieces, such as silicon wafers, to and from a work station where one or more processing operations, such as grinding of the edge contour, rinsing, drying and coating, are performed on the work piece.
Silicon wafers are cut from ingots and require several processing operations, such as grinding of the edge contour, rinsing, drying and coating, before the wafers are used further in the fabrication of electronic circuits.
The wafers are relatively fragile, and relatively high breakage rates have been produced by prior art transport and processing apparatus.
The silicon wafers vary in diameter. For example, the wafers may be 3, 4 or 5 inch diameter. A conveyor system in a silicon wafer processing machine should therefore be able to readily accommodate these varied diameter wafers without requiring downtime of the conveyor system to re-adjust or to reset the component parts of the conveyor system for a change over from wafers of one diameter to wafers of a different diameter.